This invention is related to a technique for monitoring the exposure of selected publications to readers and, more particularly, to an accurate, reliable electronic technique for determining whether an individual who has been selected as a test subject actually handled any of the selected publications and read through its pages.
Various techniques are no in use to determine the readership of selected publications. Such publications are typically magazines. The term "magazines" will be used hereinafter to include any type of publication. Publishers and advertisers require this information in order to determine readership which, in turn, is useful to set printing runs, establish advertising rates, indicate geographic areas for concentrating resources, and provide an analysis of economic and social categories of the readership, and the like.
Primary readers are relatively easy to ascertain because it is to these that the magazine is directly mailed o sold. However, the number of secondary readers is thought to far exceed that of primary readers. Secondary readers are, for example, household members, barbershop patrons, plane passengers, and the like. It is estimated that each magazine is read by five such secondary readers. To uncover these secondary readers, several techniques are currently available.
Firstly, individuals are contacted personally and interviewed as to their magazine preferences. In one approach, the individual is shown a particular issue of a selected magazine and asked whether he has read that issue recently. In another approach, the individual is shown a magazine logo and asked whether he has read that magazine during the past, for example, month. Both of these methods are inaccurate because each relies on memory recall of the individuals. This has been shown to be suspect as insufficiently accurate and, moreover, once the interviewer reveals the magazine in which he is interested, the selected individual being interviewed may develop a subjective inclination in favor of that magazine in his answers which may not in fact reflect the truth.
Secondly, a number of volunteers or paid individuals are collected who are expected to keep a diary of their reading habits. The diaries are then retrieved periodically from the individuals, and analyzed. However, this approach relies exclusively on the accurate and complete record keeping of the particular individuals involved. Unfortunately, this also tends to be unreliable because people occasionally forget to make entries, they may be distracted from doing it, or they may simply not be inclined to make an entry at any given time. Therefore, this technique is also suspect as to its accuracy and reliability.
In addition to the aim of surveying the readership of a particular magazine, it is also highly desirable to determine which portions of the magazine have been read. For example, an advertiser may wish to know to what extent the readers of a particular issue were drawn to that advertiser's ad. The effectiveness of the ad in general, and in that issue in particular, can then be assessed. However, none of the magazine surveying techniques currently in use provide this service.
One new technique which has been proposed for surveying magazine readership is disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 827,757 filed Feb. 7, 1986 by the same applicant. It utilizes a card of the type commonly found stapled into magazines. Incorporated into this card is electronic circuitry which emits a certain signal that can be picked up by a portable receiver carried by the test subject. Although this approach provides a significant improvement in terms of accuracy and reliability over known approaches, it introduces an additional cost factor. Even though the card insert may cost only several cents, when this is multiplied by millions of copies of a particular magazine issue, a significant expenditure must be undertaken.